At Summerland last weekend, I had the privilege of having two friends put me through a rite of passage that was, in many ways, just kinda perfect ( Read more... )

A year or so ago, I spent some time thinking about what it is we do as ADF Priests, and what it means to "advance" and move "higher" in the circles of study. Both words need their quotes because neither is really accurate, but they help make sense of things. And it's the inaccuracy that made me pause originally when I decided to do some work on my ( Read more... )

On Tuesday night, I finished out the last journal I had been working in, which dated back to 2007. These journals are simple blue lab notebooks I pick up at the university bookstore here: they're durable, light, page-numbered, and the perfect size to fit in a MK VII gas mask bagThe journals aren't really "journals" in the usual sense of the word, ( Read more... )

My honeymoon was going well until last night, when of all things, my phone started ringing and people just kept calling. I woke up this morning to another phone going off (Maggie's), and now I am a bit too stressed to sleep.

So I'm spending my morning reading Brice Lincoln's Emerging From the Chrysalis, trying to resist the urge to mass text ( Read more... )

As we work toward figuring out how to manage our first set of non-clergy initiatory Candidates within ADF, I've had a few thoughts, with a particular one I'd like to share ( Read more... )

As noted in my previous post, I am the eighth active ADF Priest to be ordained in ADF's nearly 30 year history. I am the third to be ordained through completion of the ADF Clergy Training Program (others were ordained when the training program was suspended, and were ordained based on work done mostly outside of the training sphere). These are no ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I've mentioned before, I have been thinking about how to work out a plan of study for candidates for Initiation within ADF. I have the most basic framework down. . . next is to decide on the two schedules that will need to run concurrently (one for journaling requirements, at least 10 months worth) and one for the "academic" requirements (which are ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

You know, in many ways, the initiation I went through changed the game I was playing, deepening it and setting new rules. I like to talk about Huizinga's notion of Homo Ludens as vastly superior to Eliade's Homo Religiosis, but I find myself encountering Huizinga's theories on a very real and intimate level in my life ( Read more... )